Merkel backs proposal to end nuclear power in 2022

May 22, 2011

Reactors 1 and 2 of nuclear power plant Neckarwestheim, run by German energy supplier EnBW, are pictured in Neckarwestheim, southern Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that 2022 was "a good time" for Germany to end nuclear power, backing a proposal by the Bavarian wing of her party.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that 2022 was "a good time" for Germany to end nuclear power, backing a proposal by the Bavarian wing of her party.

She described as "an important contribution" the scenario set out by the Christian Social Union at a meeting in the southern town of Andechs.

The centre-right government is to set out its strategy by the beginning of June and agree draft legislation at a cabinet meeting on June 7 or 15.

Following the earthquake and tsunami which wrecked the Japanese nuclear plant of Fukushima in March, Merkel ordered the closure for three months of Germany's seven oldest reactors.

She also announced a moratorium for the same period of an earlier decision by her government to extend the lifetime of Germany's 17 reactors by an average of 12 years.

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User comments : 16

Unfortunately the proposal contains enough backdoor for merkel to keep moving the goalpost. The conservatives (i.e. Merkel's party) have been the staunchest supporters of nuclear for decades.

Luckily the people aren't buying this sudden fake green conscience in the conservatives and are voting for the true green parties. Just today in a regional election the conservatives got severely defeated.

Well, my strawman for the green idelogist is the person who needs scarcity of energy for example to justify a certain social ideal. Namely the neo-socialist model whose argument is that since resources are strictly limited, they should be controlled by an authority to ensure proper distribution.

The rhetorics is; the gain of one is the loss of others, so nobody should strive for more than what their neighbor has, and you need a government to ensure that nobody does, or at least succeeds in it.

resources ARE scarce.energy IS expensive.

Nuclear power is less expensive, potentially very cheap, and with enough cheap energy available to you, recycling (instead of downcycling which is what most "recycling" actually is) materials starts to have a point.

Renewable energies are very very expensive and difficult, both to produce and to use, which is masked by the fact that they are subsidized heavily.

My personal categorization for the "greenies", based on observation of people:

Ideologists: energy/environmental crisis is used as a tool for social change. Anything that solves the crisis is bad, if it disrupts the plan. Don't really care for the environment. (e.g Greenpeace)

Hippies: magical thinkers with a strange version of reality where nuclear power disrupts the "chakra of nature" or something equally incredible bullshit.

The scared: people who don't know much about nuclear power, often possess weird ideas of how nuclear power works, what are the hazards or radiation, why powerplants fail. These are easily led by the ideologists through simple propaganda.

The pessimist: people who basically understand nuclear power, but don't believe the corporations/governments/scientists can ever make it safe enough, or if they can then there's still some hidden caveat which makes it all blow up anyways.

The idiot: "electricity comes from the wall - why do we need nuclear power?"

And finally there's the misanthrope who hates people and believes we should all die, or most of us should die, or at least revert back to being simpler animals, because people are a virus of nature or something.

These "back to the nature" and "responsible elite" types hate nuclear power because it represents the continuation of the modern human culture and the power of humans to change nature to whatever we desire.

Though one should include simple capitalist competition to the mix as well.

People who produce and sell windmills and other renewable energy technology on the large scale, or have invested in it don't like nuclear power, because renewables and nuclear power don't really get along in the grid, and nuclear power is cheaper. Their interest is to do anything they can to lobby for the removal of nuclear power, so they could sell their stuff instead.

All in all, there are good reasons why you should argue against nuclear power, but in my opinion most people are doing it for all the wrong reasons.

Because it's too easy - you don't have to change the society and culture to what the green ideologists want when you can solve the problems in some other way than what they propose.

In germany there has been a society wide agreement that we should stop using nuclear power. This has been the norm since shortly after Chernobyl. The social democracts and the greens put this agreement into law when they were in power at the beginning of the millenium. The current conservative government overturned that (against the people's will).

So it's not a matter of changing the culture to green ideologies. That change has already happened 25 years ago.

People can smoke themselves to death by cigarettes and poison their neighborhood with soot particles from burning wood in their heating systems as an effort to be "green", and spew thorium and uranium sky high from the smokestacks of coal fired powerplants.

And then complain about the hypothetical possibility of a Chernobyl-type accident in a German nuclear powerplant of a completely different design.

The only experience I have is forty years living and working in Germany. And the only personal contact, are numbered in the tens of thousands countrywide. I concur with the assessment "wide agreement" within the scope of my personal contacts.

Fukushima was Germany's last calling. This is a second chance. Second chances are rare.Third chances are nonexistence.

If the German government follows through on this, the result will be the generational impoverishment and relegation to permanent third world status of the German Nation. Such would be one of the greatest crimes perpetrated upon the German Volk! Future generations will out of the agony of poverty remember those politicians of today in infamy and disgust as today's luddites are screaming fire in the crowded theater of German politics. Solar requires the sun, and land. A great deal of land! Sunny land! Land that is free of litigation from locals who 'do not want it in their neighborhood', or from economic saboteur luddites that paradoxically or intentionally abound in free and prosperous nations. Germany does not have this free, open, and sunny land. Wind power requires windy places, and the only such places here are the mountains and in the halls of power in Berlin. The only helpers for an energy impoverished Fatherland will be exploiters who will demand intolerable concessions.

It is ignorant and arrogant to speak for and about others the way you do.

As for your neo-fascist specious screeds about socialism, there can't be anything more "socialistic" by your definition than nuclear power. It's subsidized by taxpayers and the companies that run these plants never pay the full cost of decommissioning them (which is at least the same cost as building them. So it is NOT cheap).

If thorium reactors work then GREAT! If lefties need education on the technology then so be it.

What do born again right wing anti-science anti-intellectual religious freaks know more about science than "hippies"?

How much more do wall st. greedheads who aren't educated in that area know?

Uranium fission designs of the past are DEAD.

BTW wood burning masonry/finnish stoves create almost NO SOOT! What's that? a 200 year old design? Sorry, it is YOU who is ignorant of the social, political and economic implications of these technology designs...

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